Escaping Proprietary Software with SMB over Wi-Fi

When recently trying out an Android based pad from a major manufacturer I was a bit baffeled that it wouldn't connect in "mass storage" mode to my PC. Instead, the manufacturer wanted me to install a software suite to access the pad's file system. Perhaps this is because the pad has no flash memory slot, just a couple of GB of built in flash. In any case, that was not acceptable at all for me, I don't install software on my PC just to transfer a couple of files. So I started thinking about alternatives and ended up with the Astro File manager and its SMB (Windows file sharing) plug-in to access file systems on Windows and Linux PCs or servers in the network. After sharing the directory that contained the files on the PC and typing in the IP address and the  user name and password of my PC account the file manager on the pad then showed me the files that I could then select and copy over to the local file system over Wi-Fi. Excellent, that's even better than using a cable in the first place!